Amanda Knox wants Meredith Kercher’s family to take her to visit her grave.

The appeal came in a publicity blitz to publicise Knox’s book Waiting to be Heard which goes on sale in the US today.

“I really want to go see her grave,” said Knox in an interview with USA Today. “And right now I don’t feel like I have the right to without her family’s permission. So that’s something that I want to work toward to get closure.”

Knox was convicted of the 2007 murder of Meredith in Perugia and acquitted in 2011 despite a last-ditch appeal from the British student’s family to uphold the conviction. Knox, 25, faces a

re-trial in Italy. She said she knows some people will never believe her innocence, including the Kercher family from Coulsdon in Surrey.

Tearfully, she continued: “It does affect me — me, and the peace that I have inside.” She said one of only a few books she has read about the affair was Meredith by the 21-year-old’s father, John, who described Knox’s initial conviction as a victory for justice.

“I would hope, like, I really hope that the Kerchers read my book, and they don’t have to believe me. I have no right to demand anything of anyone. But I hope they try,” she told USA Today.

Knox, who returned home to Seattle after she was cleared on appeal, admitted she hasn’t contacted the Kerchers. “I’ve always been afraid of just upsetting them, and I feel like as long as there’s question of my involvement in Meredith’s death, I don’t want to impose myself on them.”

She said reaching out might have been possible once Italy’s highest court had affirmed her acquittal, but their decision for a retrial only made it more difficult. Knox added: “It’s this, this, this field of barbed wire that I’m having to crawl through so I can finally get to the side where, OK, we’re finally on the same side as the Kercher family.

“The ideal situation in my mind is that they could show me Meredith’s grave. Because it was like, I wasn’t allowed to grieve, either, and that would mean a lot to me,” she said.

Knox acknowledged she had heard she had been called names like the “American temptress”, “she-devil with an angel face” during her trial but insists her detractors were wrong.

“For all intents and purposes, I was a murderer — whether I was or not. And I had to live with the idea that that would be my life,” she said in her first TV interview with US network ABC, which will be screened tonight.

“It’s one thing to be called certain things in the media and then it’s another thing to be sitting in a courtroom, fighting for your life, while people are calling you a devil,” she said.

Knox told USA Today she may return to Perugia for the hearing even though she does not have to. If the appeals court convicts her, Italy could seek her extradition from the United States to finish her 26-year prison term, set by the trial court in 2009.

Knox admitted she considered suicide in the days before the appeal court set her free. She said it is possible to get to the point that you’re “so sad that you don’t even want to try”.

“That is the thing that I was scared of — that I would know intellectually that there’s something to glean out of life, but that I would be so broken that I wouldn’t care. I just wouldn’t want to fight any more,” she added.

Ms Kercher’s brother Lyle told the Standard he had “no interest” in reading Knox’s book. He said: “Without speaking for the rest of the family, I don’t have any interest in reading it, nor any of the books written about Meredith’s death and the case.”